Sunday, August 12, 2012

Favourite Hong Kong Movies. Jay, The Oily Maniac Part 1

Jay, better known by his pseudonym The Oily Maniac, has a voracious appetite for all things Asian cinema. He occasionally appears on podcasts to spread his wisdom on his favourite subject and has recently started his own blog, titled The Oily Maniac's Closet. Here you can find plenty of interesting stuff from the ages. The Oily one also has not only the greatest Godzilla collection I've seen, but also the best poster collection I've EVER seen. By the way Jay, the marriage proposal is still there!

Jay has openly admitted to cheating, rather than compiling one list, he has done two. A list of Shaw Brothers titles and a separate list of other HK films. Shaw's are up first.

Shaw Bros-

I was way late to the SB party. Had seen 5 Deadly Venoms and saw some stuff on TV in the '80s, but nothing really came out on VHS except really shitty bootlegs right through to the 2000s. Many of the titles were legend in the old tape trading circles, but not much materialized. And when they did it was a pan & scan, 5th generation copy with illegible subtitles. The Shaw catalog was a holy grail, rumored to be rotting in a vault, if they existed at all. Then "IT" happened. In 2002, Celestial started releasing the Shaw Brothers' catalog on DVD. It was a whole new cinematic world to explore. I was lucky enough to see "Come Drink With Me", "36th Chamber of Shaolin" and "Return to the 26th Chamber" at festival screenings. There's no way to even pick favorites because from 2002-2007-ish I watched a lot of Shaw Brothers dvds/vcds and things kinda got all blurry. Plus it's been 8-10 years since then, so who knows how some of those films will stack up now that I've seen a decent amount. Titles like "Men From the Gutter" I've only seen in the last year, so I hesitate to call it a favorite......yet.

In no particular order.

8 Diagram Pole Fighter.

Hong Kong Godfather.

Black Magic 2.

Boxer's Omen

Human Lanterns.

Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan.

Killer Constable.

Five Element Ninjas.

Holy Flame of the Martial World.

Avenging Eagle.

Mighty Peking Man.

Saw this in the theater and the image of Danny Lee spinning that leopard with it's ballsack flopping about is burned into my eyes.

About Me

I discovered Hong Kong cinema over 20 years ago when Channel 4 showed a series of Hong Kong ghost stories which included screenings of Rouge and Encounters of the spooky kind. I watched them all and wanted more,next up was Jonathan Ross' Incredibly strange film show on Tsui Hark where they showed a clip of Chow Yun Fat hiding guns in plant pots from A better tomorrow and the shootout that follows. My mind was blown there and then but the thing that made me a fan forever more was seeing a trailer on a palace video release for The killer. Ever since I have been watching and spending far too much money on HK related goodies (and the kit to watch them on). The blog is somewhere to put my thoughts on my HK passion, a passion that refuses to die even though HK cinema is struggling at the moment.